We're on vacation!

Yeah! Finally, our summer vacation is here. Yes, I know it's technically fall, especially with the horribly cold weather here in Lausanne. Last night while we were in Lutry for the wine festival we all were wearing winter coats, etc. But this morning, we're heading to Genoa, Italy where it will be sunny and warm and then Sunday we head to our cruiseship for a week of Mediterranean sailing. We're going to Naples, Sicily, Tunisia, Mallorca, Barcelona and Marseille. I've packed a massive suitcase and I'm almost ready to get on the boat with 3500 other people, most of whom are italian. I'll be posting lots of pictures when I get back.... as long as I don't fall overboard!

My watch is dead...or is it?

My watched stopped Sunday while we were climbing. I finally went to the store this morning and spent 9 francs on a new battery to realize that the watch is just dead. and then while writing this entry, I looked at my watch, and now it's ticking.... what the hell! So I fix the time, and it stops ticking again.... agh!

Dragana's 30th suprise birthday party!

Yesterday was Dragana's 30th birthday and her boyfriend, Nenad decided to throw her a surprise birthday party. She was totally surprised! It was also a harrowing exercise in french for me. I realized last night that I never really learned how to chit-chat in french, which made socializing with others at the party a bit wierd, especially since I'm so talkative and normally have no problem talking to strangers. In the end I survived!
Here's a video of when Dragana arrived with everybody singing 'Happy Birthday' to her in french.

Joe goes climbing!

Sunday Joe went climbing for the first time with me, Stephan and Cara (a girl in Jan's old lab). Even though it was cloudy, the weather was nice up at Pierre du Moëllé. Cara had her GPS with her, so now we know that where we were climbing is exactly 1833m, which is over a mile high! If you want to see all of the pictures, follow this link.

-Stephan teaching Joe how to tie his knot.

-Me belaying Joe.

-Joe looks so hard core near the top of the wall.

crazy busy fun long weekend!

(Note: the hyperlinks (except one for the map of the hike) take you to my picture sets on flickr.)

Last Friday and Saturday was the annual Lemanic Neuroscience meeting in les Diablerets. This year I was a student organizer and got to go up a night early to help set up for the meeting. It was a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun to do. I even got to hang out with the two women guest speakers and talk to them about their careers and how they balance science and a normal life. Even though they're both very successful, it's nice to see that you don't have to be a superwoman (like my & Joe's advisors) to be a good scientist.

-organizing committee & the 2 guest speakers Thursday night at dinner

As a student organizer, I organized a trip up to the newly opened Alpine Coaster at the top of Glacier 3000. It was really fun! I took five guys from EPFL and the University of Geneva up to the top and we had an absolutely beautiful day. After riding the coaster, we then took a chairlift down to the glacier and walked around for about half an hour. It sucks that it's so expensive to get up to the glacier or I'd like to go again with Joe before it closes for the season.

-Johannes & Christian in their sleds

-the coaster and station from the bottom

-Ullrich, Johannes, Ruthger, Christian, me, Gijs on the glacier

-Here's a movie of the coaster. It's a bit bumpy because I was sitting in the sled waiting to go down the coaster myself.

Living in Switzerland we don't get to celebrate Labor Day, but we do get a random Monday off in September for the Jeûne Fédéral holiday. It's some holiday that has to do with fasting for a religious reason and most people eat prune tarts. To take advantage of this holiday, we went for a 6 hour hike in Ovronnaz, which is in the Valais. Jan suggested the hike to Adrian as a 'nice hike', which it was, but it was more agressive than we expected, especially since this was the first hike for Stephan in his new hiking boots. Once we saw the 500m assent, we remembered that Jan is Swiss-german and of course, he considers that 'nice'. Even with all of the climbing, we managed to finish the hike in 5 hours instead of 6. A lot of the signposts didn't have times listed, so we weren't sure if we were on time or not, and since the chairlift stopped running at 5pm, we hurried to get back in time. It also started raining quite hard about half hour before the end, so we were all soaking wet... nothing like hair product leaching out and running down your neck.... ewwww.... If you want to see where we hiked on a map, we started at Jorasse, walked up to Fenestral, around the mountain past the lakes to l'Erié, to Lui D'Août and back to Jorasse.

-Joe, Adrian, Stephan & me about 2 hours into the hike (I learned how to use the self timer on the new camera!)

-back at the chairlift, soaking wet, and surprisingly smiley

Jacqui's hen night & Sai's birthday

What fun we had last night! We started at the caveau in Lutry for some wine, cheese, sausage and 'manly cake'. The managers of the caveau thought the penis bottle cork and balloons were funny...but it was still a good thing we were hidden in the back room. Once we got kicked out of the caveau, we headed into town, sans Melody, to meet the boys at Kerrigan's for a few drinks for Sai's birthday. I think the guys enjoyed playing with the penis balloons more than we did....hmmm. No comment. We also covered them in 'male rating' stickers, some of them weren't happy with the ones they got, but tough.

-Melody, Rikki, me, Jacqui, Kristen & Mayumi at the caveau
-Jacqui & her penis balloons-Sai, enough said.

The rest of the pictures are posted on flikr here. Check them out, they're really funny.

teaching Stéphanie to bake chocolate chip cookies

Last Saturday night, I finally taught Stéphanie how to bake chocolate chip cookies at her apartment. For her birthday in June, I gave her an american cookbook with american measuring cups and spoons, and proper american brown sugar and vanilla extract...everything she needs to make proper cookies. The cookies turned out great! As you can see below, Manu, Stéphanie's boyfriend, loved both the cookie dough and cookies. Joe and Manu were forbidden to come into the kitchen at one point because they kept stealing warm cookies. After cookie baking, Stéphanie then made us curry chicken and mushrooms for dinner... very yummy.

-Manu neck-deep in the bowl trying to lick off the remaining cookie dough

-Manu the cookie monster trying to steal another cookie off Stéphanie's plate

PS. These pictures were taken with our new Panasonic camera! After 4 years, and thousands of photos, our old Canon is now RIP. Hopefully the new one lasts just as long!

Pictures from Kristen!

yeah! I got the pictures of me on the wall at Pierre du Moëllé from Kristen yesterday. Years of dancing truly helps a lot with climbing... thank goodness for an insane amount of flexibility... now I just have to work on getting stronger and getting rid on my chicken arms!


In other news, Stéphanie, my maid-of-honor, just finished her first week of her new job. Congratulations! Also, Jacqui's 'hen night' (AKA bachelorette party) will be next Tuesday night at the Caveau in Lutry. Tuesday is also Sai's birthday, so who knows where we'll end up. Watch for pictures next week... hopefully they'll be fit to print!

I love/hate photoshop!

So for almost 3 years now I've been hand merging all of my microscope pictures into one large picture of my tissue, and for almost 3 years now it takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to do. Joe had mentioned that Jan had found a function in the newest version of Photoshop that autostitches all the pictures together. Today I found it. It assembled 25 images in about 4 minutes. I'm still sitting here staring at the screen in complete bewilderment of how much time I wasted assembling these images!